On a couple of occasions I have described my Grand Vision For How Social Media Ought To Be, which is roughly that there should be a bunch of different:

• publishing services, like Substack and Ghost
• reading apps, like Gmail and Matter
• community platforms, like Slack and Discord

and we should look for ways to make these reading, publishing, and community services all play nicely together. I’m calling this model “the unbundled web,” and I think RSS should be the primary method of interop. (The term “decentralized” has already been co-opted by all those bitcoin people, so I’m using “unbundled” as a synonym with less baggage.)

That’s a pretty high-level view of things. Over the past several months I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it looks like if you zoom in to the next level. If I had the ears of a bunch of people working on publishing, reading, and community apps, what features would I ask them to implement? What features should I implement in Yakread, my own reading app?

It’s important to stick to the essentials. The less stuff there is that needs to be built, the higher the chance that it will actually be built. With that in mind, here’s what I currently think the essentials are, subject to change:

1. Community apps should provide the option of publishing an RSS feed of all new posts.

Your reading app should be able to subscribe to new posts from all the communities you’re in. You shouldn’t have to check a bunch of different apps all the time. If there’s a single place where people can go for new posts from all their communities, they’ll be more likely to engage in lots of different communities instead of settling on a few.

Discourse is the only community app I’m aware of that publishes a feed. For example: https://meta.discourse.org/posts.rss. More apps should do this. It doesn’t need to be mandatory—lots of communities want to be private. But I’d love it if I could tick a box in the settings page for my Discord server and have it start publishing a feed, with appropriate UX so that community members understand that my server is public. For private servers, maybe have password-protected feeds so that members can subscribe with their reading apps after signing in to the community.

2. Publishing apps should compile a “social feed” with your posts from communities you’re in.